page_title: Spandau Prison
section_title: Prison regulations
hierarchical_section_title: Spandau Prison / Life in the prison / Prison regulations
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Berlin, Raeder mit Ehefrau Zentralbild/25 25.11.1958 Erich Raeder aus der Spandauer Haft entlassen Der ehemalige Großadmiral der deutschen Kriegsmarine, Dr. h.c. Erich Raeder, 79 Jahre alt, wurde am 26.9.1955 aus dem Spandauer Gefängnis entlassen. Raeder war am 1.10.1946 von dem Internationalen Gerichtshof in Nürnberg zu lebenslänglicher Haft verurteilt worden. UBz: Erich Raeder mit seiner Frau nach der Gefängnisentlassung im Bürger-Hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Abgebildete Personen: Raeder, Erich: Großadmiral, Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine, Deutschland (PND 118743511)
context_page_description: Spandau Prison was a prison situated in the borough of Spandau in the British Sector of West Berlin.
  The prison was built in 1876 and knocked down in 1987 after the death of its last prisoner, Rudolf Hess. This was to stop it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
context_section_description: Every part of life in the prison was strictly set out by a set of rules designed before the prisoners' arrival by the Four Powers — France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Compared with other established prison regulations at the time, Spandau's rules were quite strict.
  The prisoners' outgoing letters to families were at first limited to one page every month;
  Talking with fellow prisoners was prohibited;
  Newspapers were banned;
  Diaries and memoirs were forbidden;
  Visits by families were limited to one of fifteen minutes every two months, and
  Lights were flashed into the prisoners' cells every fifteen minutes during the night as a form of suicide watch.
  A lot of the stricter regulations were either later relaxed, or deliberately ignored by prison staff. The directors and guards of the Western powers (France, Britain, and the United States), often complained about many of the stricter measures. The complaints were often vetoed by the Soviet Union, because it thought the rules should be stricter. The Soviet Union suffered 19 million civilian deaths during the war, and wanted the death penalty for all of the prisoners at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Western commentators accused the Russians of keeping Spandau prison in operation chiefly as a centre for Soviet spying, as they had an excuse to drive into western Berlin, and the soldiers often looked out over the city instead of into the prison grounds.
caption: Erich Raeder released from Spandau Prison, 26 September 1955, with his wife at the Bürger-Hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg
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